Introduction

The contention that animal classifications are intrinsically social [e.g. Douglas, 1966; Leach, 1964; Tambiah, 1969], and which finds its immediate historical legitimation in the Durkheimian theory of knowledge [Durkheim and Mauss, 1963], has been strongly criticised by those persuaded by a more universalist–evolutionist position. These latter argue, in effect, that a type of classification exists which is, for all intents and purposes, independent of the rest of culture and society, conditioned primarily by objective features of the natural world and pan-human cognitive structures of the mind. Some [Hunn, 1977b: 61], in support of this, have noted that Durkheim and Mauss had themselves distinguished between ‘technological’ and social classification, the former being clearly distinguished from speculative beliefs linked to social structure. Such a distinction, of course, is an important article of faith, because if it were not so, many of the generalisations about the pan-human character of classification would be undermined. My own view, which has emerged and consolidated during the years in which I have been engaged in the Nuaulu research programme, is that no firm distinction between mundane and social can be sustained; that the place of certain animals in otherwise essentially mundane biological classifications cannot be explained purely in terms of appearance and behaviour, but must take account of cultural presentation and representation. Animals and plants, therefore, in this sense, can never be morally neutral; while it is inconceivable that classification might proceed in a way which, to use Geertz's felicitous phrase, ‘externalises culture’.